| Where's Waldo? Google Glass app helps find friends in a crowd Los Angeles Times Google Glass isn't even on the market yet. To test the app, the group is running it on their Samsung Galaxy S III phones and using Pivothead glasses that have video cameras attached to them. In theory, the app will work with Google Glass and any type ... See all stories on this topic » | ||
| If It Gets Them, Google May Open .Search, .App, .Blog And .Cloud gTLDs To The ... TechCrunch If Google is awarded the right to manage the domain registrations for .search, .app, .blog and .cloud, there is now a good chance that it won't just use them for its own services and will open them up for non-Google properties, too. Last year, when ... See all stories on this topic » | ||
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| Strengths and weaknesses of Apple's Siri and Google Now San Jose Mercury News I never thought I'd be telling my phone what to do. But I often find myself talking to various digital assistants -- Siri on the iPhone and Google (GOOG) Now on Android devices -- to request driving directions, restaurant recommendations and answers to ... See all stories on this topic » | ||
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| Google's huge 'Wikilinks' corpus could help computers understand human ... The Verge Google has released an extremely large dataset which could help developers build software that accurately interprets human language. Known as the Wikilinks Corpus, the collection comprises more than 40 million individual links from web pages to ... See all stories on this topic » | ||
| Wis. woman loses privacy lawsuit against Google Minneapolis Star Tribune Beverly Stayart, of Elkhorn, alleged that if someone started typing in a Google search for her name, Bev Stayart, the search engine offered "Bev Stayart levitra" as one search term. Accepting that suggestion led to ads for Levitra and other treatments ... See all stories on this topic » |
延續先前Google Glass計畫，在一年一度的SXSW大會中，Google再度展示一雙"會說話的"鞋子，主要將配合與Android手機連接後，藉由安裝於鞋子內部的 GPS、加速感應元件等，進一步感應使用者動作狀態給予運動或行進間指示，另外也能彼此進行交流。 【
Amazon's Popularity: The Kiss of Death?
Amazon has eclipsed Apple as the most-admired company-a signal to sell, say contrarians. There is evidence to support that contention that when the news about a company is all good, it's time to get out. Mark Hulbert reports. Photo: Getty Images.
WSJ的影片評論 很有意思.
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Facebook Acquires Team at Storylane, a Social-Blogging Platform
Facebook Inc. FB -2.16% said it has acquired Storylane, a social network built around personal stories, for an undisclosed amount.
The deal, which follows in Facebook’s longtime tradition of acquiring young startups for talent, will bring Storylane’s team of five employees, including its chief executive Jonathan Gheller, to the social network. Facebook confirmed it is winding down the Storylane service and said it will not be acquiring user data from Storylane.
“The team from Storylane will be an incredible addition to Facebook,” a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. “Their previous work showcasing real identity through sincere and meaningful content will make them a perfect fit at Facebook.”
Founded two years ago, Storylane was designed to be a foil to social networks that prompted users to share moments of their life in quick snapshots or in text posts of 140 characters of less. The site pushed users to answer larger questions about their lives, such as religion or childhood.
In a company blog post released Friday, Mr. Gheller said Storylane decided to join Facebook after several discussions about how the two companies could work together. Facebook, which unveiled a redesign of its news feed on Thursday that prominently features photographs, has been tinkering with how users share and promote their stories on the social network.
“This is an exciting opportunity. Facebook’s mission of connecting the world has always been at the center of our work, and like our friends at Facebook, meaningful connections are what our team is most passionate about,” Mr. Gheller wrote in the blog post.
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看不太懂 (因為是針對英文版的Facebook). 所以先留下紀錄.
Facebook on its Clutter Conundrum
By Evelyn M. Rusli
This week’s redesign of Facebook’s news feed reveals just how complex the problem of solving clutter has become for the giant social network.The makeover, unveiled Thursday, gives users the power to drill down into slices of their feed, such as all the activity from their friends, or the pages they follow, or to simply see all the real-time content available to a user. It also features a more minimal design, as Facebook attempts to manage a growing mountain of data while serving the disparate interests of its users, advertisers and developers.
For roughly a year, the problem of balancing all of that has fallen on the shoulders of Will Cathcart, Facebook’s lead product manager for news feed. Every day, Mr. Cathcart and his team must keep the clutter at bay.
His news feed team includes a group of roughly a dozen engineers who closely monitor the news feed algorithm, called EdgeRank, which determines what pieces of content a user sees and in what order. It addresses hundreds of variables for each user, such as how many times someone has liked certain kinds of posts or how a user interacts with a specific publisher. The group of engineers frequently makes small tweaks, usually on a weekly basis, and are constantly running experiments to test possible changes to the algorithm.
Because changes to the algorithm affect Facebook’s primary channel to consumers, the group works with various parts of the company. CEO Mark Zuckerberg usually makes the big decisions.
Mr. Cathcart’s team sits at the center of the debate of how Facebook should craft the user experience, while also trying to be a public company that answers to shareholders. Although Facebook has said it is pushing the most “relevant blend” of stories into a users’ news feed, that feed increasingly has more ads, which naturally reduces the number of posts a user sees from their friends and the pages she or he follows.
According to Mr. Cathcart, the placement of ads on the news feed is not determined by the main algorithm. Instead, ads are automatically inserted after a certain number of posts. Which ads a user sees is determined by a separate algorithm, which takes into account how much an advertiser was willing to pay to serve that ad and the taste profile of the user.
Mr. Cathcart’s team has been under fire since last fall, when Facebook released a major change to its algorithm in a bid to throttle spam. Spam complaints sharply dropped, according to the company, but it also spurred criticism from business owners and publishers, who reported that their reach–or the number of users who saw their posts—-plunged. Many accused Facebook of manipulating its algorithm to make room for new ads and to push businesses to buy more ads.
Mr. Cathcart acknowledges that maintaining the balance on news feed between ads and user-generated content is an ongoing challenge. Facebook recently completed a study to determine what impact ads had on user activity, or engagement. One group, comprised of millions of users, saw the normal flow of ads. Meanwhile a second group, also made up of millions of users, saw no ads.
According to Mr. Cathcart, the study showed a 2% drop in engagement for the group that saw the normal flow of ads versus the group that saw no ads. Any drop in engagement should upset Facebook, given its loftier mission of connecting the world on its platform. But all things considered, Mr. Cathcart said, it really wasn’t so bad.
“The impact of ads is very small,” he said.
根據科技網站The Next Web報導，這次的改版包括以下3個重點：
1.圖片空間更大：和過去相較，圖片佔據的空間大幅增加，更為顯眼。
圖片來源：臉書官網
2.更為個人化：為了方便使用者更容易找到自己想要看到的動態消息，新改版的頁面新增了類別篩選的功能，你可依據不同的性質，過濾動態消息，選擇的項目包括：所有朋友、照片、音樂、遊戲、粉絲專頁等。
圖片來源：臉書官網
3.使用經驗更為一致：新改版之後，不論從桌上型電腦、平板電腦或手機上臉書，版面設計和使用方式完全一致。
但這次改版並不會立即全面推行，如果使用者希望能夠立即體驗，可進入臉書官網登錄，加入等候名單。1.圖片空間更大：和過去相較，圖片佔據的空間大幅增加，更為顯眼。
圖片來源：臉書官網
2.更為個人化：為了方便使用者更容易找到自己想要看到的動態消息，新改版的頁面新增了類別篩選的功能，你可依據不同的性質，過濾動態消息，選擇的項目包括：所有朋友、照片、音樂、遊戲、粉絲專頁等。
圖片來源：臉書官網
3.使用經驗更為一致：新改版之後，不論從桌上型電腦、平板電腦或手機上臉書，版面設計和使用方式完全一致。
表面看來，這次的改版主要以界面設計為主，而非重大功能的創新，原因究竟為何？
臉書執行長馬克．祖克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）在記者會上說明了，這次改版目的是希望讓臉書的動態消息頁面成為使用者的「個人化報紙」（personalized newspaper）。
確實，對許多上班族而言，上臉書看新聞已經成了習慣，但同時臉書也面臨了其他對手的競爭，例如推特。
哪些訊息會出現在臉書的動態消息頁面，其實是經過多重「算計」的結果，使用者往往無法真正取得最廣泛、最及時的訊息。特別是再推出廣告付費機制之後，有付費的貼文比較容易出現在動態消息頁面上，這一點近來也引發許多爭議與不滿。
相較之下，推特沒有臉書的複雜運算系統，所有你關注的對象只要有新的推文，便會即時出現。對於真正想要掌握最多新聞資訊的使用者而言，推特其實是更好的選擇。
因此如何從視覺呈現與界面設計上凸顯優勢，便成了臉書的重要策略。
但是，這次能否因此減緩去年開始出現的「臉書疲乏」（Facebook fatigue）現象，避免流失更多使用者？似乎有些難度。
根據MarketWatch報導，美國社群媒體稽核公司SocialBakers的調查顯示，2012年12月，美國臉書使用者人數減少了140萬人。除了瀏覽臉書會消耗過多時間之外，動態消息頁面出現愈來愈多的粉絲專頁廣告，更是關鍵因素。
但新改版的動態消息頁面，並未解決上述的問題，反而是更有利於廣告。事實上，這次的改版，廣告營收恐怕才是背後的真正原因。廣告營收是臉書不可或缺的獲利來源，更是影響股價表現的重要原因。更好的介面設計，自然能吸引愈來愈多企業運用臉書平台宣傳與廣告自己的品牌。
然而，愈是有利於廣告，卻很可能因此愈快速流失既有的使用者。（吳凱琳編譯）http://www.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=5047696&page=3
【新聞來源】With new design, Facebook takes a bite out of Twitter
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